Holy Saturday

Dear friends, 

Last Saturday I was in Baltimore at a family Passover Seder, and heard again the questions asked by the youngest person at the table. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” our young friend Gussie asked.  That question is the prompt to recall the Exodus story and to recite it aloud in community, around the table.  At Passover, Jews remember how God brought the Hebrews out of slavery into freedom–by God’s mighty hand.  The night is different from all other nights because we pause to tell the story. 

Today, on Holy Saturday,  our question as Christians may be “Why is this day different from all other days?”  We don’t have a formal ritual for this day–the long day when Jesus is in the tomb between his death on Good Friday and Easter morning Resurrection.   Unlike most years, we will not gather this evening with the Easter Vigil service due to the Concord250 events.  Many of you will be attending those events or perhaps will stay at home cooking and doing other preparations for Easter dinners on Sunday.  The solemnity of the day is overshadowed by so many other things and our joyful anticipation of Easter morning! And it is an opportunity to pause.

I want to invite you to pause, just for a moment, and live into the question “Why is this day different from all other days?”  Not to necessarily have an answer, or even to speak about it.  Holy Saturday is a day for stillness and quiet.  For those first disciples, it was a day of deep darkness.  Their friend and rabbi was dead, and with that reality–a cruel death they had seen with their own eyes– so were their hopes for the future.  We can only imagine how quiet it must have been on Saturday after all the drama and horror of Good Friday.  How did those friends get through it?  A sabbath day filled with grief?  I can only imagine that the friends held one another close; that they were kind to each other; comforting as best they could through their tears.  We, who know the rest of the story, are invited to pause today, if only for a moment, to honor the day–the space before the Good News of Jesus’ Resurrection was revealed.   A space and an experience we all know in our human lives….places where hope is dashed, grief overwhelms, and where friends and community show up, for that is what we do for one another.  

I invite you to pray today and to savor this poem; a Holy Saturday offering that connects sorrow with kindness.  “Why is this day different from all other days?”  Because we are reminded to be kind. At the end of it all, this we can do in days of sorrow and days of joy. 

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for Easter joy!!

Your sister in Christ, 

Nancy+

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

+ Naomi Shihab Nye